If you can run stairs for 45 straight minutes, you don’t need to burn 500 calories. You likely need to add 500 — or 1,000 — calories — to fuel such intense workouts.

Running stairs for that long is one suggestion for people trying to lose a pound a week. (3,500 calories = 1 pound. 3,500/7 days = 500 cal/day.) It may work — once. I doubt you’d want to try it again.

Same with jumping rope for 42 consecutive minutes.

Better to skip the 20-ounce Starbucks chocolate mocha. With whipped cream, you’ve saved 580 calories. Without whipped cream, you’ve saved 510, or the equivalent of hula-hooping for 50 minutes, according to information from the Des Moines Register.

An interesting discussion on the listserve of the Association of Health Care Journalists started with hospital readmissions and morphed into end of life care.

Connect the dots in a particular way and you’ll draw a picture of the “government’s killing Granny” crowd with their shorts in a knot.

Preventable readmissions are becoming a big deal as Medicare exacts penalties on hospitals with revolving doors. This is part of the change in payment from fee for service, where everything done generates a bill, to bundling payments for taking care of populations. The change is part of health care reform legislation.

For the price of one cup of coffee a week — she didn’t say whether it was a double espresso grande latte or the sludge from the office vending machine — Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said workers could be assured of some income if they had to miss up to 12 weeks of work because of a family or medical crisis.

Gillibrand, who is sponsoring the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, stopped in at a small business Friday in Rochester to make the pitch. Under the proposed legislation, employers and employees would divert 0.2 percent of wages to a special fund that the worker could tap. A worker would get 66 percent of his/her salary during the time they were out.

With hospital merger mania hitting Rochester — Rochester General Health System looking to join with Unity Health System and also to absorb in some fashion Clifton Springs Hospital & Clinic and making eyes at United Memorial Medical Center in Batavia — it’s at least amusing and possibily instructive to see what’s going on elsewhere in the world of medical mergers and acquisitions.

“Insurance is about protecting against risk. In the health arena, the risk at issue is of large and unexpected medical expenses. The proper role of health insurance should be to finance necessary and expensive medical services without the patient incurring devastating financial consequences.

“Over the last decade, however, Americans have come to expect their health insurance to subsidize the consumption of all medical care. Rather than simply protecting against financial catastrophe, insurance has become a pass-through mechanism to pay for every type of medical service, including routine ones.”

If the health system is supposed to be shifting toward patient-centered care, why is the examining table shoved against a wall, forcing the patient and doctor to do contortions to get at an affected area?

Why aren’t modern exam rooms designed with the table in the middle, giving the provider a 360-degree (or whatever an elliptical would be) view of the reason — the patient — why s/he is there?

Another example: If a local health system boasts how much it cares, why would a provider says she’s doing the patient a ”favor” by filling out the form that details the service with the excuse that no one knows from week to week whose job that is.

What’s in a name? Lots of subjective interpretation of a seemingly objective label.

For some people, the name marijuana conjures images of tokin’, rolling papers and double album covers, getting high and a craving for brownies.

For some people, cannabis conjures images of a plant with chemical properties that can be used to treat illness.

The day before NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to wave his wand and declare by executive fiat that marijuana will be legal for limited medical use at certain hospitals, I and others wonder if he means the polarizing weed made (in)famous in Reefer Madness or does he mean the complex botanical that when prescribed by qualified health professionals may provide hope for individuals and families dealing with disease.

In one scene of a Ray Bradbury story, the main character picks up a book. Only the “book” was a sheaf of metal and he turned the pages by pushing a button. What was written more than 50 years ago, I read on my Kindle.

So science fiction is fact — something I’m slower than others to grasp. Maybe because I wonder whether all our advances — imagined and actual — will be used for good.

About this blog

Patti Singer

Health Reporter

Being healthy means that you’ll be in good shape if you get sick. That may sound odd, but think about it. We may not be able to prevent every illness, but if we can delay it, minimize it and recover quickly, we can get back to our lives. That’s the beauty of a healthy lifestyle – what I call wellness insurance.

I’m fascinated by how we define health and what we do to achieve and keep that physical, emotional and spiritual sense.

I used to be a sports writer. I joined the Democrat and Chronicle in 1985 to write about the Rochester Red Wings and wouldn’t trade that experience for an infinite number of first-round draft choices. I moved from sports to features in 1991, and wrote about personal health, travel and general topics. I joined the metro staff in July 2009 to focus on health.

I am certified as a personal trainer and I earned a master’s degree in education from The College at Brockport, where I teach an undergrad course in contemporary health issues and a grad course in health communication.